Lord Young of Cookham: We made it quite clear that where an area wants to move from where it is now to tier 2 unitary, we want to look at the proposal as a whole, and we do not believe it is right for any one component to have a veto. That is different from where two local authorities, as we are about to debate in a moment, want to get together and merge. We think that where they are going to merge—in other words, there is not going to be a wholesale reorganisation—it would be wrong to compel people to merge if they do not want to.
So, locally led proposals for district council mergers are to be assessed against criteria which we announced to Parliament on 7 November 2017, which include both the criterion that to be implemented a proposal should command a good deal of local support in the area and the criterion that the merger is proposed by all the councils to be merged. Locally led proposals for unitarisation are to be assessed against different criteria, announced to the Commons on 28 February 2017, which include the criterion that to be implemented a proposal for an area should, when judged in the round, be assessed as commanding a good deal of local support in the area.
Unlike in the case of mergers, unitarising an area does not need to be proposed by all the councils involved, since that area necessarily includes two tiers of councils, so that even if some councils in the area do not support the proposal, the area of those that do may cover the whole area. I may not have convinced the noble Lord—in fact, I can see that I have not convinced him—but he asked me what the criteria were and I have explained them.